MARCH 7 2020 LISTENER 67
LIFE UNDER LOCKDOWN:
News organisations often
rely on the storytelling
ability of ordinary citizens
to cover events in places
journalists can’t go, and
Britain’s Channel 4 News
has found an absolute gem
of a citizen correspond-
ent in Irish teacher Ben
Kavanagh, who posted
video diaries of life in locked-down Wuhan as
the effects of the Covid-19 coronavirus disease
became apparent. The channel has edited
together his dispatches, culminating in a 14-day
quarantine on British soil, into a 20-minute story
called Coronavirus & Me. Kavanagh is at turns
droll, pensive and stoic – his relief at reaching
safety and seeing his mother is tempered with
regret at leaving a life in Wuhan that he loved.
tinyurl.com/NZLKDiaryWUHAN DIARY: There are other Wuhan diaries,
including a series made by Chinese cinema-
tographer Hai Tang as he cared for his wife, an
emergency-room nurse who developed pneu-
monia after contracting the virus. The series has
been subtitled by a Western YouTube user and
it’s intimate and at times very moving – in epi-
sode six, he ventures out to get flowers for their
wedding anniversary. “I never really imagined it
would happen to us,” Tang tells the camera in
the first episode. “But now that it has happened,
I need to face this head on.” tinyurl.com/NZLTanghuman-rights movement has
seen so much progress in the
space of 50 years,” says Firrell,
“but there is always more to
be done. How we think about
gender now will liberate – or
blight – people’s lives for the
next 50 years.”
WEDNESDAY MARCH 11Tōku Whare Kōhanga Reo (Māori
TV, 8.30pm). Like Marae DIY,
but with kōhanga. Te Ataakura
Pewhairangi and Nathanial
Howe present this new series
in which language nests
around the country get a
spruce up. Some are hoping
the makeover will attract
new tamariki, others need to
expand because of demand.
The series begins at Te Kōhao o
te Ngīra in Hamilton, where
the roll has fallen to just 18
pupils.THURSDAY MARCH 12
Lego Masters USA (Three,- 3 0 p m). It began in Britain
and it has been rolling around
the world like a big rolly thing.
Australia was first out of the
blocks (sorry) with last year’s
show hosted by Hamish Blake;
the American version is hosted
by none other than actor
Will Arnett, the voice of Lego
Batman, who is an executive
producer along with Brad
Pitt and his Plan B produc-
tion company partners. The
judges are Amy Corbett and
Jamie Berard, both designers
at Lego – Berard is famous for
Online by RUSSELL BROWN
Catch of the Week
of a mostly female group of
doctors in an underground
hospital to provide care for
the citizens of Eastern Ghouta,
a suburb of Damascus that
was reduced to rubble in
2013 by Syrian armed forces,
with Russian air support. It’s
confronting, especially in its
unflinching depiction of the
awful injuries suffered by
Ghouta’s children.
Not all reviewers have
applauded Fayyad’s focus on
injury and suffering. Writ-
ing for the AV Club website,
Vikram Murthi lamented its
tilt into “morally questionable
grotesquerie, a catalogue of
anguish that doesn’t spot-
light anything except endless
brutality”. But the director was
unrepentant in an interview
with the CBC last year, “The
film should put people in an
uncomfortable position to
look through the terrible real-
ity around us.”SVOD HIGHLIGHT: What’s
good in subscription
video on demand. Liz
Garbus, who directed
the documentary What
Happened, Miss Simone?
for Netflix, tells the real-
life story of the Long
Island serial murders as
a narrative drama in Lost
Girls, which premiered
recently at the Sundance
Film Festival. It’s on
Netflix from March 13.Ben KavanaghLego Masters USA, Thursday.